Invited I gave a privacy and surveillance workshop as part of ECIS 2019.

1. nsfw as surveillance, self
surveillance, and regulation
Ben Light
Connected Lives, Diverse Realities Research Group
School of Health and Society
University of Salford, UK
@profbenlight / b.light@salford.ac.uk / www.benlight.me

2. what do we mean by nsfw?
• Track the tag’s different uses and functions in contemporary social
media and analyze its role in drawing boundaries of acceptability.
• Consider how the NSFW tag seeks to invite certain kinds of
encounters with online content.
• Propose additional meaning for NSFW by taking the term literally
and using it as a framing device to explore the changing contours of
risk, safety, and work in a landscape shaped by digital media and
networked communications.

3. nsfw - origins
• The Internet slang term and social media tag NSFW—“Not
Safe/Suitable for Work”— is widely used in Anglophone
contexts (and beyond) to organize and regulate sexual
content and pornographic imagery, often in connection
with humor.
• The online information resource, “Know your meme,” has
tracked the emergence of NSFW to the social news
aggregator site, Fark, in the year 2000.
• On Fark, the disclaimer “Not safe for work. Not safe
period” first accompanied a link to the Stile Project, a site
famous for its galleries of gross-out imagery, shock porn,
and explicit violence. The term was gradually adopted on
Usenet and, by 2005, websites were dedicated to NSFW
content (Know Your Meme 2013).
• As a classifier, NSFW resonated among newsgroup users
before becoming applied by commercial platforms and
growing ubiquitous within social media as both a warning
and a lure.

4. nsfw as warning and invitation
• At the heart of NSFW lies the notion of unsafety connected to the
risk of losing one’s job or social status yet, it extends an unspecified
sense of risk also to sexually explicit media content and sexual
communication more generally.
• This risk of being caught out both averts and engages
• It involves surveillance, self surveillance and regulation

5. media ‘tagging’ - surveillance,
self surveillance, and regulation
• Established in 1912, The British Board of Film Censorship set in
place the film categories of U–Universal, A–Adult, and, in
1932, H–Horrific.
• The X rating was first introduced in 1951 to mark content
suitable for those aged 16 and over and, since 1970, for those
above 18.
• In the United States, the four-tier Motion Picture Rating
System was introduced in 1968 as the film industry’s system of
self-regulation.
• Divided into G for general audiences, PG for parental
guidance, R for restricted, and X for adults only, the system
was centrally concerned with displays of nudity, sexuality, and
violence.

6. nsfw – modes of encounters

10. nsfw – as framing device

11. pornography
The first wearable tech that allows
you to ‘love the planet by loving
yourself’ (Pornhub 2015).
Producing 100% renewable “guilt-free
electricity,”
Wankband is part of a longer chain of
publicity campaigns profiling
Pornhub’s brand and services as fun,
user-friendly, socially responsible, and
risk-free.

13. making us safe for
work
• device access
• platform access
• sex and humour at work

14. regulation and
governance
With notable exceptions such as the
Chinese Tencent QQ (est. 1999), Baidu
Tieba (est. 2003), QZone (est. 2005),
Sina Weibo (est. 2009), and WeChat
(est. 2011), or the Russian VKontakte
(est. 2006), the most broadly used social
media and instant messaging services all
originate from, and remain based in, the
U.S.

15. surveillance and
academia
• Emails
• Personal Devices
• Personal Spaces
• Permissions
• Reception
• Publication

16. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/nsfw
Ben Light
Connected Lives, Diverse Realities Research Group
School of Health and Society
University of Salford, UK
@profbenlight / b.light@salford.ac.uk